Cultivated plants, whether they are cultivated for their flowers, their fruits, their seeds or their vegetative parts, are the subject of numerous controls and treatments, so as to obtain the best possible yield and the best quality.
Thus, for example, it is attempted to control the flowering periods so as to avoid flower buds being initiated during periods where there is a high risk of frost. Likewise, when it is desired to obtain large size fruits, or more generally more vigorous plants, the plant is pruned so as to limit the number of branches and thus the number of “storage” organs represented by fruits in the swelling period or seeds undergoing filling. The use of fertilizer also makes it possible to optimize the yields.
Such controls and treatments require a knowledge not only of the plant itself, but of the conditions under which it is cultivated: nature of the soil, climate, etc., in particular in order to know when and how to prune the plants. Moreover, pruning is an expensive, tedious process which requires the intervention of qualified individuals.
In order to remedy these drawbacks, the prior art has proposed processes for the chemical treatment of plants in order to control their growth, by definitive or temporary and total or partial inhibition of the growth of the branches, so as in particular to optimize the yield of these plants.
In particular, it has been proposed in patent document FR-A-2 930 402 to bring the plants to be treated into contact with a solution containing a natural or synthetic strigolactone, so as to inhibit or limit the growth of all or part of the branches.
Strigolactones are plant hormones of the apocarotenoid family. They are principally composed of a backbone comprising four rings termed A, B, C and D, more specifically of a tricyclic lactone ABC connected, via an enol ether bond, to a butyrolactone ring termed ring D. Numerous natural strigolactones, such as sorgolactone, 5-deoxystrigol, strigol, orobanchol, 2′-epi-orobanchol, solanacol, orobanchyl acetate or strigyl acetate, and synthetic strigolactones, such as GR24 or GR5, are currently known. Applications of strigolactones have been described not only for controlling the growth and architecture of higher plants, but also for inducing germination of the seeds of parasitic plants such as Orobanche plants. In order to remove said parasitic plants from agricultural soils, it is thus proposed to treat said soils with strigolactones, so as to induce the germination of the parasitic plants in the absence of host plants essential to their existence, thereby leading to their death.
Among the strigolactones, the molecule termed GR24, of formula:

in which the ring A is an aromatic ring,
and the molecule termed GR5, of formula:

devoid of rings A and B,
have been described by the prior art as particularly effective for repressing the branching of higher plants. Besides the fact that these compounds are not very easy to synthesize, they have, however, the drawback of being relatively cytotoxic.